Outside, all through the campus, there was the noise of students pouring in, dropping things, bumping into each other, and people trying to talk and be heard above each other. But in the Library Building, everything was filled with quiet. It was the way Lara liked it.
Lara Vera, Madame Librarian was a woman who inspired fear and respect. Anyone who reached the position of head librarian at Tituba was not a person to be taken lightly. Anyone who held onto the post for more than a year was treated to reverent awe. Lara had been Madame Librarian for three years now. One more year and she would catch up with her predecessor, who had indeed pre-deceased her. There was still confusion over what exactly the man had been doing in that particular section, but further investigation had connected it to some rather unsavory business and the faculty's interest had withered away.
For the most part. Librarians are curious by nature. It's why they love books so much. Lara was fairly sure she had worked out what the previous head librarian had been trying to do, and these days she could not keep the disdain out of her eyes whenever someone mentioned his name. Lara had a good face for disdain; it was rather long with sharp points. This combined, with her normally half-closed eyes, gave her an almost permanent expression of haughtiness.
It was not that she actually was haughty, but she confined her attention to the things that needed it the most. These things being her books, her library, her assistant librarians, and herself. Her time spent with the books had, of course,made her widely read. People tended to avoid her if they could, especially the younger students, who feared her, and the decorated wizards, who always suspected that she was somehow making fun of them.
Lara never made fun of wizards. In her opinion, they did a pretty good job of it without any help from her.
At the moment, Madame Librarian was checking the health of the books in a section that was off limits to all students and most of the faculty at that. Space in the Library was very strange. From the outside it appeared to be another building beside the main one, quite rectangular and plain. But inside the shelves curved as though the room were circular. And somehow, once one lost sight of the reference desk, the shelves became a forest, with rows and turns that should not have been physically possible. They rose up forever into the air, and somehow never hit the ceiling. Sudden sinkhole, still lined with shelves, bored deep into the ground, and were still brightly lit as though by the sun. There were tunnels of books, mountains and valleys of shelves.
Wise people only went after books while carrying a ball of yarn with them, to play out after them as they ventured in. But for the most part the Library was safe if one obeyed the rules. And if someone called for help, the Assistant Librarians, or Madame herself, could almost always make it in time.
Lara was sitting on a broomstick as she checked the tomes, floating high, high above the marble floor. A broom was not a usual method of transport at the University. Mostly witches used brooms, and witches as a rule hated being told what to do, and so rarely tried out a formal education. They preferred to learn things instead. Lara had learned witching long before coming to Lutetia, and had put up with Tituba only because she loved books.
She was dressed practically in a man's waistcoat and pants in dark grey, with her long, chestnut hair in a ponytail. She wore the white silk gloves of a Librarian, and a belt from which hung a number of strange objects, such as the emergency whistle, a pouch of writing tools, some paper, a small safety lantern, her glasses case, and a flask of something that could knock out the most hardy of students but Lara drank like water.
The Library was a wonderful and dangerous place. It was the books that did it. Books are wonderful and dangerous. Oh yes, there were the magic tomes that could speak in tongues or change as they were read, or only allowed themselves to be held by certain people. But the most dangerous books of all were the ones of perfectly normal paper, that when read caused amazing things to happen in the mind of the reader, who then went out and used those words to change the world.
